Aren't those widely regarded as 'not as good', because right now LLM's are a game of "who has the most resources wins"? And even those require very high end personal computers.

The freedom pendulum looks like it swung away from individuals.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48542100

They're not Opus 4.5 level yet, though the really big Kimi and DeepSeek v4 models (which need like 600+ GB of GPU-available RAM) aren't too far off.